Well, the IE team has posted an excuse for why IE 8 will not handle widely used CSS 3 extensions. The reason, its hard, and it was a stretch goal. Instead we are left with a slightly more standard implementation of the filter css attribute, -ms-filter, as opposed to filter.

Furthermore, the IE team claims that they are doing this so that “web authors do not have to rewrite their stylesheets”.

OK. Let’s look at this objectively. It is indeed hard, building a web browser from scratch is no joke. I have tried several times, and I am still trying to build a web browser. I have tried this in C++, Java, even Ruby. It is always hard. Most of the difficulty comes from trying to render pages that aren’t formatted properly. Right or wrong, it is how the web is currently built. However; I have a radical solution, I apologize in advance for the shout, *USE WEBKIT*. Why is this a problem? It would be easy to use the standard msie7.dll or whatever for pages that need the *broken* button in IE 8. Then use a new WebKit based render mswebkit.dll for pages that are standards compliant, or not using that strange IE 7 tag. If Multiple IEs works, this would be completely possible.

Let’s take a quick look at why Microsoft might not want to do this. Google uses WebKit, and Apple uses WebKit. As far as the technical difficulty in this, many lesser organizations have implemented a WebKit based browser from the webkit source without hiring a million developers. I think that an organization like Microsoft should be able to handle building a browser using or based on WebKit within a few months. I wish Microsoft could occasionally be more like Google and throw out the product managers and just build what the world wants. I don’t understand why they can’t consider this.

Now about the sentence, so that “web authors do not have to rewrite their stylesheets.” I am a web author, and I will not rewrite my stylesheet. IE users, I am sorry, you will just have to live with a broken layout. I do not have the time or the interest in rewriting my cool, cutting edge web applications to work with 10 year old technology. They said this stuff was written originally in IE 4. It came out for the PC originally in 1997! Come on, advance! I will not write anything for IE. I will make sure it functions and none of the tasks that a user would do in my web applications are blocked, but I am not going to try to make it have rounded rects, or opacity, if IE doesn’t support web standards. That sentence alone indicates Microsoft’s hubris, note the “have.” If it were mozilla, they would say so that web authors don’t want to rewrite their stylesheets, not that they would ever have that problem. Microsoft is still pretending that IE is relevant as far as developer mindshare.

Microsoft does some amazing things, but as far as the web is concerned, it is pretty much off my radar. Users, please, please upgrade your browser to Chrome, Firefox, or Safari.